It was quite the workout to raise the anchor from 20 meters deep. But with both of us pulling we managed without our rope to the winch backup plan. Inside the bay we hoisted the mainsail and motored out. Just as we were in deeper water, a pod of humpback whales greeted us. What a majestic sight! As the darkness fell, we changed to staysail and few hours later put in a reef to the main. The night was rainy and fast. The waves were tossing us around and neither of us got much sleep. In the dawn…
Apple rejected an astronomy app from the iOS App Store because “it was astrology”. When the author appealed, Apple doubled down because “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.” Ridiculous, right? Well. The author in question is Terry Godier, and while I understand that he has gained quite the following in recent months, I am not a fan. He is unabashedly pro undisclosed AI writing, having conjured — “written” would be inappropriate in this context — a whole essay on…
https://rcs-discography2.com/search.php?type=acode&key=fish6000Location : New York CityOwner : Elmer DadeDate : 1962 (copyright: October 20, 1961)Source : Lancaster Eagle-Gazette from Lancaster, Ohio · March 8, 1962, page 9Tommv Fisher : To Appear In - New York City ; Former L a n c a s t e r resident ; Tommy Fisher will make his debut at New York's famous "Peppermint Lounge" upon his return to that city later this month, j - The 1958 graduate of Lancaster - High School plans to make a series…
Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine comic strip for 8/5: Dating tip: avoid crazed lunatics; and while we’re on the subject, ax murderers too — when on offer in the sexual marketplace, let caution be your watchword Now, as for ax murderers, return with me to 1969 and my first male lover, Larry. I was in fact his first male lover as well. We both had had sexual experiences with other men, but what developed between us was a passionate connection of affection as well as raw sex, and I moved him…
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s I Have This Thing for Flowers connect our humanity to flora in surprising and magnificent ways in one of the year’s most powerful essay collections. Booklist wrote…
Day: 1Show: 2Title: Chum!Category: Comedy / Musical Theater / Audience participationBy: Theatre EngineCreated by: Alexis Bacon & Alison DobbinsLocation: Rarig ArenaSummary: A musical parody of the 1975 movie Jaws.Highlights: I'm not sure I've ever seen Jaws, but now I kind of want to, although it's probably not as much fun as this musical parody is. The four-person cast, accompanied by a two-piece band (keyboard and percussion), tell the full story of the murderous shark who terrorizes a…
I was in Cheltenham earlier this week, where they were filming something or other (Young Sherlock). I was a bit distracted by the lovely carriages to pay any closer attention.
Like most people, I've been growing increasingly concerned about microplastics. I don't think I started taking the fear mongering seriously until that 2024 study said we all needed to throw out our black plastic spatulas yesterday. I remember the day I heard that news, I went in my kitchen and looked around and saw that everything was plastic. So gradually I started replacing things one-by-one: plastic tupperware with glass tupperware; the dreaded black plastic spatula with a wooden one; our…
I’ve written before about being between two communities with very different attitudes toward our current generative AI moment: Artists, writers, and other (non-tech) creators mostly loathe it with every fiber of their being, to the point where they’ll vociferously argue that so much as asking Claude for a list of good curry places in London is a betrayal of the Enlightenment. Tech people often embrace it even when they admit the downsides. There’s a lot of “the energy costs are horrible, stolen…
TL;DR: A smoky week in Portland brings back 2020 wildfire PTSD. My smart appliances have started nagging me to buy phones, the raccoons threw a midnight pool party and wrecked my fountain pumps, and the cats are handing out RPG quests. Plus, some thoughts on treating AI coding assistants as peers rather than tools.
I recently overtrained a couple of GPT-2 style models, training them both on 40 tokens per parameter rather than the 20 per parameter that is generally regarded as "Chinchilla-optimal". The normal heuristic is that instead of doing that, you should scale up the number of tokens and the number of parameters equally -- so I would have been better off scaling up the model by 2 and the token count by the same amount. By doing that, I should expect to get a better model in terms of loss on my…
Hey people! Today, I’d like to share with you something by Canadian musician Pamela Morgan. She is from Newfoundland, and was the lead singer and co-founder of the band Figgy Duff, one of the province’s most prominent bands in the ’70s and ’80s. The band ceased their activity as such after the death of its founder Noel Dinn, and after that Pamela pursued a solo career. She grew up in a musical family and is very versatile, being a singer, multi-instrumentalist and producer, and has her own…
For five summers running, a working farm turned nudist resort outside a small town in southern Ontario pulled off something genuinely strange. Every July, thousands of people, clothed spectators included, drove out to watch a naked beauty pageant that got more press coverage in its first year than a visit from the sitting Prime Minister. It was called Miss Nude World, and between 1970 and 1975 it turned Freelton, Ontario, a place most Canadians had never heard of, into an unlikely fixture of...
Day: 1Show: 1Title: The Precious ScarsCategory: Drama / Storytelling / LGBTQIA+ ContentBy: Applause Community TheatreWritten by: Brian Farrey-LatzLocation: Rarig Stoll ThrustSummary: An imagined conversation between Harvey Milk and Billy Sipple, a gay man who thwarted a presidential assassination attempt.Highlights: The well-known gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk and the ex-Marine who wrestled a gun out of a potential assassin's hands and sued the publications that outed him as…
StarringColin Farrell, Jin Ha, Tony Dalton, Raymond Lee, and Laura DonnellyOverviewWho is Sugar?John Sugar is a dashing private eye navigating the dark corners of sunny LA. Though he sees only the good in humanity, Sugar is haunted by a secret too dangerous to expose.Review Sugar The first season of this show had a completely unexpected twist at the end, leading to a truly fantastic first season. Did it *need* a second? Maybe not, but I’m glad it exists. It was darker — much more intense and…
This was the first audiobook that I’ve ever listened to, and if it wasn’t part of the NYT Summer Reading Challenge to listen to an audiobook, I never would have listened to it. While I listen to podcasts, I don’t listen to audiobooks because I find that my mind tends to wander while listening and thus I absorb much less of the text than I otherwise would have. Reading is exercise for my brain, a deeply enjoyable and immersive pastime and somehow listening doesn’t provide me with the same…
Yesterday I was over it. I think I’m gonna go back into hibernation for 5, 7, maybe 35ish years, I thought to myself, and the rest of you can tell me how it all shook out later. That’s how afraid of my own shadow I am: I’m always about to crawl back into a hole. I’d cognitively hibernated for 8+ years but it was clearly not long enough. You will not be missed, someone wrote—the last comment ever left on my website, visible only on the Wayback Machine—and then, a little bit inexplicably, they’d…
Automatically create @herdrdev workspaces when you add a workspace to http://Stooges.dev - https://gist.github.com/scottwater/9467447340c62875d955b50d16e9e19c
Herdr + Pi is a very flexible combination. You can run them just about anywhere, with just about any model. Both have strong extension stories, so even if you have a very specific workflow in mind, you can likely modify one or both to meet your goals.This is the way!
Created with GIMP
I've had a lot of ideas over the years, many for things that would be good for my local community, for my city. I've acted and followed through on some of them. I've started and petered out on others. At this moment, none of them are ongoing. When I'm toying with any of these ideas, I'm often thinking about how I could turn it into a real business, that makes money, one that I could put sustained effort into. But for most of the ideas, the business-side is a distraction from the work that…
📺 Only Murders in the Building, Season 5 declined in quality by quite a bit near the middle, enough to have me stop watching. Good thing we are a family of completionistis, because the show picked up steam and pulled off one of the best endings of the run. I for one cannot wait to see the crew in London, schmoozing with all the British guest stars.
Dear Constant Reader, Here it is, Friday again. And we’ve got a heat advisory again. I hope you all are staying cool. Which leads me to your tip. Bring a fan to shows. Not that kind of fan that cheers for you. And not the big feather kind either. A folding fan. It helps keep you cool backstage. It’s also useful for drying your liquid liner or eyelash glue. Helps with hot flashes as well! In the summer I always have a folding fan in my purse, which I will employ whenever I think it’s too hot.…
I’ve been tinkering on a solver-oriented interactive proof assistant as a library called Knuckledragger https://github.com/philzook58/knuckledragger .
This is an interesting, quirky keyboard from an interesting, quirky company that is well-executed except for the configuration software. It’s got a retro vibe to it. Part of that is the case material, which is polyetherimide (PEI). PEI has some interesting properties in this application. It’s not nearly as common as PBT or ABS for keycaps, but it has some interesting properties: High stiffness and excellent dimensional stability. High heat resistance (far beyond anything a keyboard will see).…
Ty Finck considers the favorability of 20 things over the years. I love making charts to visualize life, and this is a fun exercise to consider.Reply via email
I meditate before bed every night. My default mental state is ... stressful. Just this semi-constant tension and anxious thoughts that go with it - what could I have said differently, what am I doing tomorrow, mistakes from years ago, etc etc. Before bed, I'm very tired. But I'm almost incapable of falling asleep without this meditation, because I lie down and the tired is overpowered by the tension, and my mind just never settles down, and then I get restless legs and my body won't settle…
Went to see the musculoskeletal specialist this afternoon about my bad back, which was doing much better today until he gently poked at my lower spine to see where it hurt, and then it hurt again. It’s nothing major, thankfully, and it should continue to improve. I have a 5 page PDF of gentle exercises for my core muscles to try. Let’s see if I can do them for a more than a few days before I forget. This was one of those moments where I was reminded that I don’t leave the house very often and…
Stephanie talked me into signing up for the Bellahouston Park 10K, on the 22nd of August, right as I finish Couch to 5K. Her reasoning: I won't run it well, but that's exactly why it's useful. A number now, however rough, is something to measure everything else against by the time I stand on the Paisley 10K start line next summer.
A perfect late summer salad: Small cubes of watermelon. Small cubes of cucumber. Crumbled feta. Chopped mint. Toss together in a bowl. Enjoy.
